California Unemployment Rate Down

Despite the growing problems in low wage jobs across the state of California including wage theft, and employee misclassification, there has been an overall decrease in the unemployment rate throughout the state.

According to a recent article from the Modesto Bee, the current unemployment rate in California has fallen slightly to 6.3 percent. The recent economic upswing has created approximately 30,000 new jobs across the state.

As our Los Angeles employment attorneys understand, this down from the last estimated rate of 6.5 percent unemployment as the state Employment Development Department has recently reported. This down somewhat more significantly from last year at this time when the state unemployment rate was nearly eight percent. However, it should be noted California’s unemployment problem is still significantly higher than the national average rate of 5.4 percent.

For statistical reasons, the state agency differentiates between farm jobs and non-farm employment. All but 500 of the newly created jobs were non-farm sources of employment. This is good news for workers who live in urban areas in Southern California like Los Angeles. While the number percentage of lower wages is still much higher than better paying jobs, and the trend is increasing on a macro scale, this recent boost in employment numbers reflect lost manufacturing jobs do to oversees production were being replaced by jobs in the education sector, healthcare industry, and professional and business services.

However, it also important to note these numbers can be somewhat deceiving as there is no further description of what types of jobs are being created in these sections. Many people may think healthcare jobs pay better that working in a retail store, for example, it is entirely possible many of these new health care jobs are low paying jobs such as data entry and environmental services positions.

One of the problems with lower wage jobs is not only do workers end up working full-time, and sometimes more than one full-time position, there is still a great deal of wage theft, discrimination, misclassification, and other issues faced by these workers on a daily basis.

For example, many employers try to treat their employees as independent contractors when it comes to paying benefits and overtime wages (in that they do not), but still supervise and control every aspect of their worker’s job performance as if they were employees. This is known as employment misclassification and is violation of our state employment laws and may be actionable in a court of law.

One of the best things an employee can do is to keep a journal or record of instance in which that workers believes he or she is being misclassified or their employer is otherwise violated California labor laws so they record can be used to help your attorney settle a case or it can be used as evidence should your case go to trial.

It is also important for the employee to contact an experienced attorney as soon as possible, not only will the situation probably get worse, there may time limits to bring an action or otherwise file a complaint, and it may also be harder to prove a case when a great deal of time has passed.

Contact the employment attorneys at Nassiri Law Group, practicing in Orange County, Riverside and Los Angeles. Call 714-937-2020.